Presently, all huge buildings are installed with a building automation system which provides monitoring and control of the mechanical equipment as well as electrical components installed in the building. Such building automation system collects data, performs alarm analysis, schedules equipment operations and provides interfacing to other services such as ventilation, electrical, plumbing and other miscellaneous alarm monitoring.
In a conventional automated building, there will be automation for HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), security, electrical and fire fighting systems etc. Presently, these building automation systems are disparate systems which imply that HVAC, security, electrical and fire fighting systems are stand alone systems. These stand alone systems do not communicate with each other. Hence, there is no way of aggregating the data from different data sources of each of these systems. This makes the user of these systems to refer to data of different building automation subsystems manually and then take decision regarding management of the building. This might take long time to monitor and analyze the data and hence the decision may not be happening at real time. Further, the conventional systems use proprietary protocols and legacy technologies such as OPC, BACNet, Lon Works, MODBUS to communicate data from devices to Control layer and then to Supervision layer. With these legacy technologies, building interoperable, scalable solutions was not possible due to the lack of automation standard based on web services standard.
In the conventional systems, one building automation system in a building is not integrated with other building automation systems within the same building and across multiple buildings which are geographically distant. Hence, the conventional system has not been integrated to monitor and control all utilities available in a plurality of buildings from a central location. Therefore, there exists a need to develop an architecture and a method for centrally monitoring and controlling plurality of building automation systems.